The Al Qods Brigades Chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani beat the US to the draw in Cairo. He arrived in the last week of December and discussed with President Mohamed Morsi’s top advisers how his organization could help the Muslim Brotherhood build their own militia-cum-secret service.

Syria launches Scuds against the rebels as they near the Al Safira chemical weapons depot. Lavrov asserts that the weapons are under control – for now. Netanyahu goes to Amman for talks with King Abdullah.

Both sides to the Syrian conflict appear to have launched a form of poison chemicals against their foes. Western and Middle East military sources say pro-Assad forces may have brought into the Homs battle of Dec. 23 imported gas grenades which Iran used to quell the 2009 Tehran riots. debkafile: Although Jordan claimed Sunday it “would not enter into any alliance to protect itself,” large NATO and US forces have prepared the kingdom for chemical attack. Some intelligence sources estimate Turkey or Israel may be next after Jordan.

Tehran has plans to maintain its grip on Syria, even while Washington and Russia are pressing on with secret discussions on the fate of Syrian president Bashar Assad and, in Damascus, international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi Tuesday, Dec. 25, gave himself an extra six days to mediate a deal for ending the war. debkafile: Saudi intelligence chiefs at the GCC summit in Manama revealed that Iran intends launching Hizballah and local militias to sabotage any international deals and any transitional regime.

debkafile Special: Last week, the Azerbaijani police picked up six Iranian secret agents looking for the air bases housing the drones their government purchased from Israel. The agents carried cash, fake passports, automatic pistols, advanced electronic equipment for tracking aircraft and electronic warfare devices for jamming them. Their capture foiled an Iranian plot to trap one of the UAVs as it flew over the Azerbaijani-Iranian Caspian Sea border. As the agents’ clandestine handler, the Iranian culture attaché was barred form returning to Baku.

Moscow has answered the US Patriots in Turkey with the top-line Eskandar missiles for Syria for which the West has no answer. This compounded the bad news coming from Pyongyang of North Korea’s first successful long-range three-stage missile test. To neither does Obama seem to have an answer.

Tehran is set on capturing an Israel drone like the American UAVs it has downed. Iranian spies in Azerbaijan went looking for the bases where drones purchased from Israel were held – and were arrested.

The Naples Police’s seizure last Friday, Dec. 7 of five containers before they were loaded on an Egyptian freighter shut down two of Iran’s clandestine arms routes to Gaza - from Kosovo and Macedonia via Croatia to a secret depot in Verona, Italy, debkafile reports exclusively. They acted on a tip-off from Israel. More sections of the Iranian arms ring were then rolled up in other parts of Italy. The Egyptian vessel bound for Alexandria was to have unloaded its arms cargo at an unmarked stopover in El Arish.

The Hamas brought the Israeli offensive down on the Gaza Strip by pushing out the military envelope too far against Israel while it was still the weakest cog in Iran’s radical terror machine. When Obama learned of Khamenei’s design to convert the Gaza Strip into Iran’s southern front, he okayed the Israeli operation.

Iran suffered a serious setback in the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli operation to get rid of Hamas’s pro-Iranian leaders. Tehran had conceived of the Gaza Strip as its gateway to the Muslim Brothers of Egypt and Jordan. Though small in time and scale - and relatively inconsequential in the large Middle East picture - the eight-day Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip helped elevate the US to the Middle East major league at Iran's expense.

An Iranian freighter departed Bandar Abbas port Sunday, Nov. 18, with 220 short-range missiles and 50 improved long-range Fajar-5 rockets for the Gaza Strip, debkafile reports. The ship turned toward the Bab al-Mandeb Straits and the Red Sea. The new Fajar-5s have a 200-kilo warhead, packing a bigger punch than the 175 kilo-payload of the rockets now in use with the Palestinian terrorists of Gaza. Hamas has removed part of this payload to extend their range as far as Tel Aviv 85 kilometers away.

Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi warned Sunday, Oct. 28: “The drone was definitely not the latest Iranian technology.” He was talking about the drone sent by Iran and Hizballah over Israel on Oct. 6 and implying it was not the last word in their armory - or even the last to reach Israel. debkafile: In mid-September, Tehran secretly shipped to Lebanon a batch of its most advanced Ababil-T UAVs for new missions, after developing a new stealth attack series with a range of 2,000 kilometers.

Less than 24 hours after Sudan’s Omar Bashir pledged “decisive steps against Israeli interests” for the destruction of the Iranian missile plant in Khartoum, Palestinian rocket teams early Sunday, Oct. 28, fired Grad missiles as target finders against Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona. This is reported exclusively by debkafile. They missed, but Hamas is expected to keep on trying to improve its aim, having undertaken to serve Tehran as its southern, anti-Israel operational arm, like Hizballah in the north.

Sudan’s President Omar Bashir said Saturday, Oct. 27 that “Israeli interests are now legitimate targets.” He spoke after Iranian generals secretly examined the rubble left by an air attack on Oct. 24 of the Shehab ballistic missile factory in Khartoum. While Israel has not commented on the attack, Sudan’s Information Minister said “military experts” had determined it was destroyed by Israel-made missiles. debkafile: The high rank of the Iranian investigating team attests to the consternation in Tehran over the Yarmouk factory's loss.

The rules are simple: The duelists are masked, they fight in the shadows and their main weapon is the element of surprise. The latest joust took place in Khartoum where unidentified bombers obliterated a factory complex manufacturing Iranian ballistic and other missiles as Tehran’s strategic reserve for emergencies. A star-studded delegation of Iranian generals is in Sudan to probe the episode.

Russia has won from Baghdad the same privilege as Iran for using Iraqi air space as a corridor for delivering military supplies to Bashar Assad in Damascus. The huge arms deal Putin and Maliki signed this month provides Syria with a reserve arsenal across the border in Iraq.